Redesign of grid-based enterprise information network through servers consolidation

In the past decade, many enterprise information systems (EIS) have been developed with enormous resources, such as a dedicated server per application (http, email, DNS, File, SMS, backup, etc). Thus, the overall utilization of EIS is low in compared with its resources, especially the servers. In this paper, we present a practical way to increase the utilization of EIS by consolidating many of the applications into a few servers; therefore, the power and maintenance costs for EIS are reduced. An EIS comprises of a set of servers, where each server acts as a root of a minimum spanning tree (MST) connecting a number of clusters. Each cluster consists of a set of clients. All the servers within EIS are connected by a high-level MST. We aim at improving the servers´ utilization by removing the underutilized servers and reconstructing MST by rerouting its corresponding clusters to remaining servers through. The proposed consolidation technique explores to increase the utilization of remaining servers through consolidation, while maintaining an acceptable performance of remaining servers. We have performed experiments on a medium-scale EIS by reducing 25% of its existing servers having lowest workloads, and reconstructed MSTs. The experimental results demonstrate a better trade-off in improving the average utilization of remaining servers by 13% through servers consolidation.